SaaStr Scale Kick Off with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and SVP & GM Amelia Ibarra

Hello everyone! Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are tuning in from. We are so excited to be kicking off our final digital mega event of of the year, SAS for Scale. It's going to be a good one. We've got an insanely good lineup. I'm Amelia Ibarra talking to you. I am the GM and SVP here at SAS. And I've got amazing panelists here. And I will let the crack team introduce themselves.

I'm Jason M. Lemkin, chief blogger at SAS.

I'm Taylor Bellhouse. I'm the speaker— the SAS speaker team.

And I'm Caitlin Bartley, also on the SAS Drive speaker team.

Excited to be here. Kick things off.

So, Amelia, you want me to give a little bit of an overview here?

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

So thanks, everyone tuning in now. The team will give a deep dive on what we're going to do the next 2 days. But first, just wanted to thank everybody for joining. We've been doing all different sorts of SAS Drive events, I guess, looking at this. Since about our first meetups in 2013 and 2014. And it was— they kept getting bigger. We added SaaStr Europa, we added more, and it was definitely a minor bummer when we were unable to do the SaaStr Annual in real life this year as COVID hit us as the first mega event in the world that sort of went down due to COVID. But we rebounded, and all in all, we'll have 100-some-odd folks register for our digital events, and over 500,000 folks tune into our digital events this year. So we're excited to have you, and most, most importantly, we're excited that we've been able to expand the footprint of what we do outside of these physical events. So it's great that about 85% of the folks that tune into these digital events have never been able to attend a SaaStr event in the real world. And as you know, we probably had folks— we've had everyone from the CEOs of Slack and Mailchimp We'll have Okta and Blackline and Airtable tomorrow and today and so much more. So it's cool. And then kind of looking to the future, we'll touch it at the end. We're going to keep up this cadence for folks. So we will do 3 to 4 major digital events a year so that we can keep doing this larger for our community and engage more folks. So we will do SaaS. This is our second year for SaaS to Scale. SaaStr Scale was in San Francisco last year. Today it's on the internet. And the goal is sort of go back to the roots of SaaStr and have in particular CEOs, VPs of sales, VP of marketing, VPs of customer success, and so on teach you how to build up to $100 million. So we'll keep doing some version of SaaStr Scale every year. We reworked some of what we're doing to SaaStr Build in March, and that's about building great software, building, building things that can scale. We'll have the CEOs of Twilio, of Notion, of GitLab, of monday.com, of Loom, and a lot more at Build. It's going to be pretty cool, and it might be our best lineup ever. SaaStr Enterprise was a hit, so we're going to keep having an event that's very enterprise-focused. You may remember we had the CEOs of Box and Coupa and tons of other leaders at SaaStr Enterprise for folks that are doing big deals. And we'll bring more and more customers and more and more buyers over the years to SaaStr Enterprise. And then of course SaaStr Annual is our flagship event. And we're hoping, we're not gonna talk about it too much in December when we have 200-some thousand cases of COVID a day in the US, but we are planning to go live in the real world for SaaStr Annual in September of next year if we can. You'll get more, if you're a ticket holder, as many of you are, you'll get more information soonish. You know, we've had the first injection in the UK of the vaccine today. So as crazy as we're on the other side of this, and we're reasonably confident we can do a SaaStr Annual in September in the Bay Area, but we're not gonna officially announce it for another couple few weeks or months, but more details to existing ticket holders and sponsors soon. So thanks for everyone for our support and for sticking with us. And we've kind of come up with a formula for SaaStr Scale that you'll see here. It's 2 days and there's some overlap, but probably the most special part are sort of 2 things. One is these incredible workshops and roundtables, and today, is substantially all that, and we get together 50, 100, a smaller group with some of the best speakers of all to teach you how to do something in an interactive way. And we had a lot of workshops planned for SAS Annual in real life this year, and people love them. And we said, what if we do them online? And we're doing them today. I think we have 40 or 50 of these today. They're a massive amount of work, but people love them. So if you haven't, pick a roundtable or two, a workshop, or if you're a paid ticket holder, come to all of them today. Sign up on SaaS to Scale. And these are really in many ways just as good or better than the fancy keynote session. So we've done that. And then starting tomorrow, you'll hear a lot of our more traditional main stage sessions. I'll be speaking with one of my, two of my favorite, very, very favorite public company SaaS CEOs, Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, leader in cloud identity. And you'll love Todd. So many great stories. You haven't heard it before. He's very active on social media now, but he's been quiet building a decacorn. You're gonna love this one with Todd. And then right after that, we have Therese Tucker. She founded Blackline 19 years ago and is moving up to chairman in January. So we're gonna talk about that 20-year journey. And she was our single highest rated speaker at 2018 Annual. So it's super fun to have them both together. CEO of Airtable, so many more tomorrow that you can see here. Carl Gould from Zuora. It's gonna be a great day. What's neat about these, if you haven't seen them on social media or joined, is that We're not— we try to avoid the, the, the fireside session at the real-world events, which do work, um, but they're— they tend to be kind of superficial. Online, we— I, at least when I do them, we try to do really deep dives, really push on how things work. We're going to talk about exactly the areas Octant won and didn't win. We're going to talk about when, when you can come up short and still build something successful in a way we would run out of time or would be too nichey on stage with Todd, um, with Therese Tucker, We're really gonna talk about hiring a management team and when teams don't scale and when people don't scale in a way that, again, that might be too nichey. In the real world, the recession was great at SaaS, but it was about fairly broad advice. But we go very deep in a way that a conversation between two founders is, and we think that that's special. So we're gonna keep doing this stuff digitally on the internet for all time. So stick with us. However you're viewing this, you can watch a lot of the content on Twitter, not all of it, but a lot of it on Twitter. A lot of it will be in our YouTube/SaaStr and on LinkedIn. And then saaStr.com, of course, you'll be able to stream a whole ton of it and it's SaaStr Scale. So thanks everyone for joining us. And lastly, we have about 40 minutes here. With extra time, we, or, and I will take questions. So if you have any questions about anything SaaStr, it doesn't have to be about the event, Could be some advice for your startup, whatever you want. It could be about where things are going. Hold them at the end and the team and I will answer anything with whatever time we have on this session. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks for kicking it off. All right, so we're uber excited to have today solely focused on roundtables and networking. So we're gonna do a bit of a deep dive into what you can expect today. As we're tuning in for the kickoff. So we are expecting over 20,000, probably more with our live streaming, revenue leaders from sales, marketing, customer success, and product leaders from all around our SaaS community, which is, you know, a global SaaS community, which is pretty cool to see. And, you know, more than 75 speakers across the 2 days of content. As we've noted, today is solely focused on roundtables. If you haven't heard us talk about roundtables before, we figured we would give a bit overview into them since they are a little bit different from a traditional keynote or even a traditional digital session that you may have seen lately in 2020 as you're attending these SAS conferences. So the way we do roundtables is a bit different. The way we do them is very interactive. So any of the roundtables that you signed up for— and it is not too late to sign up for them, which we'll get to next— they are interactive, so we do have them across marketing, sales, product engineering/ops. So they're divided into 3 tracks. So you can really focus in on whatever subject matter expert you're in or what you want to dig into. And they're super hyper-topical, right? So in marketing, you have things like trends for 2021, you know, Eric Siu, who's a great friend of Saastr, is going to be talking about how to, how he grew his podcast to like 4 million downloads a month. That's pretty cool. You know, you've got how to hire a great VP of marketing. In the sales track, you have everything from how to go from an individual contributor, AE, to VP of sales, you know, how to increase your pipeline for 2021. These are super deep dive topics. So you'll see in our full schedule that there's well-rounded subject matters that we've brought in from all around our SaaS ecosystem to really dive in And the idea behind the roundtables being interactive, you know, we try and keep them smaller. We do limit how many people can sign up for them. That way you can ask your question of the speakers. We have all of our speakers just do a few slides. Again, it's not like a traditional keynote where they're just going to talk at you, which is also obviously uber tactical. But this is practical advice where you can ask the expert your questions. Get feedback on your marketing campaign, your next VP of sales, whatever it may be. This is where you can come with your questions ready, turn your cameras on, and actually have a live interactive discussion with a SaaS expert, which we think is pretty cool, um, if I do say so myself. So we have more than 40 of these for today. We just did final checks yesterday, um, that's a lot for One day, of course, that we are recording them all. Again, you can think of them as small group interactive meetings. So this is really— the roundtables were really born out of this sort of lack in the digital world of being able to walk down the hall or walk into a session and talk to the speaker, grab them, ask your question, find somebody who's next to you on your laptop, and you're like, oh, you're Jurid Marketo. Or, "Keto, let's talk." You know, there's not really a lot of that happening via Zoom. So we sort of created this new format. You know, we'd love your guys' feedback on it. Tweet us, email us. We're always trying to continually improve our roundtables. But we really just wanted to make a forum where you could chat not only with the expert, but you can also chat with one another. We've done quite a few of these roundtables as test runs already leading up to SCaLE. And we did a couple of them at Annual at Home just to see if people would like them. And they were uber popular. Not only because as a community member, you know, you can chat with the speaker, but you can also chat with the other people on the Zoom, and people would have like open discussions. They would be facilitated by whomever the speaker was, and it really turns into this like live breathing content piece, which I think is pretty awesome because I think it's a great way to meet folks, and, you know, we have folks asking us to connect them afterwards with people who are in the roundtables, so we have a networking way to do that, which Kayla and Caitlin will chat about in a little bit. Um, but yeah, I, I'd say the roundtables are uber interactive. You know, come, you can come with your cameras on. It's set up as a Zoom meeting so you can actually, you know, interact with the speaker. It's not like this where it's a webinar and it's more of a back and forth. Um, so it'll be an engaging conversation. Um, there is a full schedule as we've mentioned. You can go on sastrascale.com and we emailed all the attendees this morning the links as well, so you can pop into any of the roundtables that you might have missed. Missed or didn't get the chance to sign up for. But we really brought in some of our ringers who are SaaStr favorite speakers just at past events, you know, whether it be annual, Europa, last year's SCaLE, or, you know, new voices that, you know, I really wanted to bring into SaaStr. And Caitlin and Taylor helped me here curate a lot of what we're doing, as well as Tammy McQueen, who's not on this Zoom, but a lot of folks know her. So if you know Tammy, tweet her that she did a great job. But we brought in some ringers here. So Maneka, who is maybe one of my favorite quotes on camera in the Saastr community, she's been in a lot of our videos. I love her. She's going to talk about, you know, the misunderstandings of enterprise marketing, which I feel like is uber, uber important. And a lot of marketers obviously get this wrong as they transition upmarket. She's doing that next at 8 AM. So you guys can catch that one. It's pretty early. It's a great session on the marketing track. Stephanie, who's the SVP of sales at Rigor, this is one that I mentioned. She's going to talk about going from an individual contributor as an AE all the way to SVP, you know, what that means, how to manage in all directions, career advice. So if you're trying to move up in your sales career, definitely tune into that one, ask her your questions, get some advice from her, see if you can hack it and get her to be your mentor. That would be great. Eric, who I mentioned, is going to go over the Latest Trends and Patterns for Marketing in 2021. This one's going to be super cool because it's an hour-long roundtable that Eric's doing. He's doing breakout rooms, so he's really going to facilitate discussions between marketers. So that one should be super fun because you can bring, you know, your marketing campaigns that you guys are working on and see what the rest of the community thinks about it and get some advice on how to, you know, get your MQLs up. The CPO of Nextdoor, Tatiana, who's, you know, connection of mine on LinkedIn, is was kind enough to come in and do how to build great product culture. You know, we don't typically have a lot of that at our SaaS events other than workshops. So we're excited to have that at the roundtable so that she can answer your guys' questions there. Caitlin Belay is the head of channel marketing at LinkedIn. So this is something that you guys want to, you know, if you want to crush LinkedIn in 2021, why not go straight to the source? She does it at LinkedIn for LinkedIn. She's a great subject matter expertise. Her presentation's super killer, so that'll be a good one. And then obviously this is super important, Tammy and I just talked to David Scott yesterday on his presentation. It is so good, you guys, you gotta tune into this one. It's later this afternoon. If this is important to you and your organization as it is to Disaster, obviously we have an amazing equality and inclusion program that I'm sure you guys have heard about, or you can know more about, just go to disaster.com. There's a huge inclusion page there. And, you know, he's going to talk about what brands can do in the wake of Black Lives Matter, you know, all the protests, everything that happened in 2020. He's going to talk about what you can do, and he's really there to answer your guys' question. He is an expert on this matter. He knows how to be delicate. He knows where to find balance. He's there to have an open discussion, answer you guys' questions on what to do, and give some, you know, cautionary tales of what not to do. So uber, uber important roundtable there later this afternoon, and that one's going to be just so good. I can't even fathom how good it's going to be. So that's today, and then I'll kick it over to Caitlin to talk about tomorrow.

Yeah, looking at tomorrow, some more great speakers and content lined up. Want to say thanks to all the speakers. We have been working hard behind the scenes to deliver great content and make sure that across both days it's really tactical, really engaging, and really informative to help everybody watching in the audience. So looking at tomorrow, a little less interactive, but hopefully just as tactical and informative. Again, you're looking at 20,000 people that we're streaming live to, to tune into 75 speakers both days. Tomorrow's a little bit more longer sessions and more about tactical insights. So we've got longer 60-minute sessions and then these hyper workshops, which are 20, 30 minutes packed in with some great, great tips tips to follow along across revenue scale, uh, sales, um, and a lot of different people sharing their secrets in their playbook. So we've gathered in some top CEOs and revenue leaders. We're going to share our favorite sessions on the next slide. Um, but just want to walk through the differences between the two. So tomorrow will be, um, like we said, a little bit longer sessions, but we want to make them just as engaging. So we've worked with all the speakers to make sure that they have plenty of time for Q&A. So make sure that you save all your questions and that you use the in the chat function in Zoom. The speakers will all make sure that they get to your questions as much as possible, whether it's in this session or whether we can follow up with you at another time. So lots of curated opportunities to connect with the speakers and make sure that you get all your questions answered, as well as all the tips and the secrets that they're going to share. Looking at some of our favorites, Taylor and I kind of put together this list. Jason M. Lemkin, he's kicking off with Todd, the CEO of Okta. They've got plenty of tips that they're going to walk through, and Jason's really going to pull out the secrets and the insights that Todd has been building behind the scenes. So really, really great content and some really great tips to look forward to there. Taylor, tell us about the Black Lion Talk.

Yeah, Jason, I was just thinking when you mentioned Therese at the beginning, I think Therese told you that when you guys have chatted in preparation for this, that her session from 2018 is the one she's still getting questions about. So Shout out to the SaaS community for, for loving this session and being able to allow us to bring it back. So excited to hear about all that Theresa has been up to, and obviously the transition period that she's currently in at Blackline. So know there are going to be some amazing insights there. And hopefully, we'll get some great opportunities to continue to bug Theresa for 2 more years after this. In addition to those 2 sessions kicking us off, we're also going to have a session with Gainsight in the morning talking about mastering the art and science of product-led growth. I know something that is super top of mind for everyone. Um, in the sales department, of course, we're always trying to figure out how to fight churn. So Carl Gold, the chief data scientist of Xura, is going to be joining us. He has some amazing slides, um, a lot of really good information for you guys and takeaways that you can go back to your team with after his session. And we're going to be closing the day with Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Um, really excited to hear all the transitions that he's had at Airtable, his journey, um, and his lessons learned along the way. As Caitlin mentioned, one of the great things about us doing this digitally is that you are able to contribute to Q&A. So in real life, when we had some of these amazing CEOs on stage, we didn't always have the chance and the opportunity and really the forum to be able to do live Q&A. So really excited for you guys to be able to take advantage of that during every single one of these sessions and be able to interact immediately with all of our speakers. So just like the roundtable agenda, everything is online at saserscale.com. So you can go right now, see what works for your schedule, and start to sign up for those sessions. And also know that there will— everything will be recorded, so everything will be on the YouTube page after for any sessions that you may not be able to attend live. And we'll also be streaming everything on Twitter, just as Jason M. Lemkin said earlier.

Yeah, the other thing is make sure you register for these sessions. You'll get reminders for them, and then you'll get links after for the recording. So Great to just save your seat, go on SaaSerscale right now, check out the lineup, and save your seat for some of your favorite sessions.

So for both days, aside from content, we're really excited to be able to offer some one-on-one networking opportunities for everyone. So this year we partner with Brella, and we're closing out the year with them as well. Brella is a great tool to interact— to facilitate networking among everyone at the event. So hopefully everyone will be able to use this app to make some new contacts and to connect with some folks in the SASTR community. So you can use this QR code right here to scan to join. We also have a URL that we'll drop here in the chat in just a moment, but really hope that you'll be able to take advantage of these incredible networking opportunities. As we mentioned, there are over 20,000 people that are registered for this event all across the world, so you're sure to connect with someone that you're gonna have a great conversation with and be able to learn from as well. So definitely take advantage. Caitlin just dropped that Brella link in the chat. So go ahead, that's live now. So go ahead and start signing up for those one-on-one networking sessions. And just to show you a little bit of how that process works, you can follow that QR code or go to that link. Then you can start searching by expertise or industry and schedule your one-on-one meetings from there. So once you set up your account, you're able to add some of those categories as well so people can search you. And then Brella will do all the work from there. So meetings are taking place this entire week through until the 10th. So both days you can head over and start setting those up right now.

This is great. One of the things that, you know, have— has been the biggest challenge in virtual is really connecting and getting those one-on-one networking opportunities. So really encourage everyone to take advantage of Brella. They're a great partner and a great platform to enable these opportunities. So go in, check it out, see who you're interested in connecting with, and take it from there.

Yeah, here's just a little sample of what it'll look like when you're in Brella. You'll see you'll be able to add all of your information as well as some of those tags about your expertise and your position and start to connect with like-minded folks. Okay, Amelia, back to you to talk a little bit about sponsors. We have an amazing lineup of sponsors for this event too. We certainly wouldn't be able to do these events without them. So we're really excited for Amelia to highlight some of our biggest names on the digital stage with us this week.

Yeah, thanks, Taylor. We're super excited. As Taylor said, you know, we have a whole slew of sponsors. So big shout out to Gainsight, who's our SaaS for Scale platinum sponsor, as well as the rest of our sponsors: Chorus, Conga, Freshworks, GuideCX, and Paddle. Many of them have sessions or roundtables that they're doing over the next 2 days, so be sure to sign up for those. And then of course we do have a digital version of the sponsor hall, you know, not the same as being there in person, um, so hopefully we'll get back to that next year. But for now we have a digital version of our sponsor hall. It's on saserscale.com/sponsors. Many of our sponsors are doing swag runs digitally, which is pretty cool. So they're doing a number of giveaways. One of them, like, I think Gainsight's giving away an espresso and like a Peloton. And then there's a few others who are giving away like an Apple Watch, an Emrear, and a lot of them are doing like free trials, exclusive offers just for the SASDR community. So be sure to check those out. And snag those swag giveaways. I mean, why not, right? So that's pretty fun. All right, well, we have been doing a slew of digital events, and I know Jason touched on this earlier, but we figured we would hit on it a little bit here at the end before we, you know, give you guys a preview for our next event, SaaStr Build. So Jason, anything you want to add here for 2021 schedule?

No, there were just a couple questions around this. A bunch of folks do— or I just, I should know this, but a bunch of folks are asking if they need a join code for Brella right now.

It's SCALE2020.

SCALE2020.

If you use that link, it should populate that code for you as well.

Got it. And then feel free, folks, ask a question in the chat or the Q&A. And there was another one: will we get recordings if we do not register for a session?

Yes, you will get the recording as well as the slides if the speaker has shared them with us. So most of them do and are gracious enough to share them. So we will send the recordings out. If you have a VIP pass, you'll get them all right away. If you have a free pass, you know, we'll be distributing, we'll be dripping out the videos, but you will get them eventually. Yes.

And everything will go live on the SAS YouTube channel. So that's a great opportunity to go ahead and subscribe to that right now so that you can keep up with all the great content and check out all that we've done this year too.

Yep. Ring that subscribe bell. Okay.

That might be all we have, but folks, if you have other questions, just drop them into the chat or the Q&A.

So drop them in. We're— go ahead.

No, no, you go ahead.

Okay. I was just going to say, you know, our team has shifted in 2020, obviously, not the annual and scheduled events we were originally planning. Um, so, you know, shout out to the entire SaaStr team for, you know, really helping myself and Jason M. Lemkin rally around a new schedule of events, um, helping us deliver you guys amazing content in a pandemic, deliver you networking, um, so that we could still have a SaaStr community, which I think is super cool. Um, we have a full schedule of events for 2021, which I'll just touch on a little bit and let Jason add some context. You know, Build, again, will probably be our best lineup yet. We have a bunch of speakers already lined up, which is super cool. Enterprise, you know, we, we tried this a bit last year and saw that it, it, it really was something that our community was missing till recently. So, you know, we got like the top CIOs, CXOs, And thousands of enterprise CEOs together, you know, we did exclusive networking for them. We did one-on-one matchmaking, super hand-curated sessions and meetings there of how to scale in the enterprise. And this one was a hit. So we'll do it again next year. Obviously the annual, which is our flagship event, as Jason M. Lemkin mentioned, we'll try and have in-person if possible. You know, obviously we are hoping for the best there and have some plans in motion to bring it to life in person. And then we'll do SCaLE again at the end of next year. So it's our 2021 schedule to get you guys excited.

Do you want to go to the next slide, Emily, so they can see the lineup?

Yeah, we got— we brought a little preview of SAS Rebuild for you guys with us today. So yeah, just a little sneak peek at our lineup thus far.

Oh, it looks good.

I don't see anything.

Anticipation.

All right, um, I think it's good. Um, all right, so Amelia, everyone should get emailed their schedules for the day. Is that how it's gonna happen? Everyone get an emailed copy of everything they signed up for? Is that what will happen?

Yep. So everyone this morning, um, got an email of their schedule. You'll also get a reminder, um, right before your, um, schedule starts of your personal links to join.

Got it. And then Steph will be live on Saastr Scale and saastra.com as well as YouTube during the course of today and tomorrow.

Yep, exactly. And you can— we can hit this at the end. Um, yep, Saastr Build, which will be our next event, you guys can go to now as well if you're that hyped about our next event. saastrbuild.com is up.

An agenda is still open for you to sign up for sessions, so if there's anything that you want to check out that you haven't had a chance to sign up for yet, Or maybe you have an opening in your schedule now, definitely go to sastrescale.com.

That's a good reminder, right? Registration isn't, isn't closed for any current ticket holders, so just go to sastrescale.com and sign up for anything that wasn't in the past, right?

Yep.

Those ones are harder to sign up for.

So I reminded you guys in the morning at kickoff, um, that you can still add to your agenda. Um, I'm trying to give you guys a preview of Build if it cooperates with me now. Sí.

Yay!

Right. Alright, if that doesn't get you pumped in the morning, I don't know what will. Coming soon. Cool.

All right. I think we're done. We got all our questions answered. If anyone has any, let us know. Otherwise, we'll kick it off. And there's another session still going on with Looker. I'm not sure what it's on, but I know it's one of our most popular sessions.

It is. Data Jam Looker.

Jump on, 7:00 AM. They are happening now.

Now.

So switch over. What is it on? How to sell your company for $2 billion without having to get off the sofa or something like that. What is it? What's the session?

Creating and fostering a data-driven culture.

So that was my second choice, right?

People-based content.

Yeah, but definitely check it out. Multiple sessions kicking off at 8, um, in just under 30 minutes. So make sure you look at the lineup and save your seats and join.

Have fun, everyone.

All right, everyone, enjoy the day.

Hi, everyone.

Hi.